It started right after the Civil War and helped put Gilroy on the map, but much of the city’s railroad history is a faded and forgotten puzzle of the past.
That will change if Mark McPherson’s project for the Gilroy Museum to compile that puzzle’s pieces in photos and oral history works up a good head of steam.
The son and grandson of men who worked the railroads for nearly a century, McPherson grew up in the industry and it’s close to his heart. So when he saw a need, he jumped aboard.
“I was looking through the files at the museum and noticed they did not have a lot put together on the trains, just a few good pictures, so I thought, why don’t I put a file together on the trains?” said McPherson, 67, who is retired from a career in the Santa Clara County Assessor’s office.
He is asking for the public’s help in finding the missing puzzle pieces.
“We are looking for old pictures or movies of the railroad buildings—warehouses, water towers, the turntable, roundhouse and station,” he said. He also is eager to find photos of the old steam engines in Gilroy and modern diesel engines that pushed the steam locomotive onto the side rails of history.
McPherson believes many people in town have such photos in family photo collections; even if the railroad is just a backdrop to the pictures, they still are important windows to the past, he said.
As important are the memories and stories of people who lived during the years the railroad was a focus of the city’s agricultural economy and its main link to the rest of the county, state and nation, he said.
If you have a story about the railroad, or remember its buildings, such as the roundhouse and the turntable, McPherson wants to hear from you.
Local railroad history includes all of those elements. Both small and larger railroad companies carried South County’s fruits, vegetables and canned goods to a hungry national market, replacing horse-drawn wagons, he said.
And while he’s looking to fill in a lot of blanks in Gilroy’s railroad past, McPherson is himself a walking encyclopedia of local train lore, a lot of it gleaned from old issues of the Gilroy Dispatch and its predecessors, such as the Advocate.
More current is a YouTube video of a 1947 home movie which shows a locomotive being turned around in Gilroy, then travelling south over the Pajaro River in Aromas and past the Granite Rock quarry. It can be seen here:http://bit.ly/1RJobzm.
“I think that turntable is buried,” McPherson said. “There are people who have pictures of these buildings, even if it might be by accident,” he said.
The first train came to Gilroy on April 8, 1869, and in those days the train schedule was a regular feature in the local newspaper, he said. He noted that the paper’s editor wrote at the time that the train would eventually work its way down to the Salinas Valley and open up business opportunities for Gilroy. “He was a visionary,” McPherson said.
The first “real” railroad here was the Santa Clara and Pajaro River Valley Railroad, which operated from 1869 into the 1880s, McPherson said. It later became the Central Pacific and then today’s Southern Pacific.
He is looking for information about a smaller rail line that might have operated before 1869 to haul logs north. Henry Miller, the legendary rancher and lumber mill operator might have owned it, he said.
And while Gilroy welcomed the railroad as a way to transport fresh and later canned produce, that was not Southern Pacific’s motivation, according to McPherson.
Southern Pacific developed the historic Del Monte resort in Monterey, and it was in order to transport tourists to that area that SP took over from Central Pacific in the 1880s, McPherson said.
If you have old photos or memories of Gilroy’s railroad history, McPherson would like to hear from you. He can be reached at (408) 781-5748, or email him at
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